The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex (21 page)

“This is all of you. I don’t know what happened to the rest. I believe they were abandoned.”

Jason was clearly unhappy with that answer. “There are some questions to be asked. But the first of them is, What are we doing here? And why are we going back to that dreadful country?”

I suppose that I wasn’t paying attention. It took several moments for his words to affect me.
Back
to that dreadful country?

“When were you there before?” I asked him. But before he could answer, the ship began to move on a sudden swell. The sea seemed to rise around us. A flowing wave poured through the narrow straits from the open sea to the enclosed harbour. The bole of water broke over everything in its path, Argo included, ramming the vessel against the crumbling stone jetty. We were all thrown off our feet.

The swell subsided as quickly as it had struck. Jason got back to his feet, touching a finger to his lips (be quiet about the matter) and went to help stack the strewn jars of supplies.

Tairon, with a nervous glance at Mielikki, whispered to me: “You would think Poseidon had caused the wave. Yes? But no. The wave came from the ship. I could see the pattern in the water. A deep wave flowing away from Argo, then returning to cause the havoc.”

“Are you certain of that?”

“As certain as I can be. This is an unhappy ship.”

Tairon’s words hardly surprised me. But later, he asked to accompany me ashore, into a narrow valley where Colcu had discovered a spring. Spring water was considered almost magical to the Celts, even though we had an ample supply of fresh water from streams running into the harbour. So each of us carried two large leather pouches, to be filled with as much as we could manage, such water to be restricted in its use.

I asked no questions about this. Tairon wanted to escape the heart of Argo.

“She abandoned all but the three of us,” he said to me quietly as we rested after our walk into the valley. Our water sacks were full, our faces freshened from the spring, our bellies satisfied with almonds and the rich berries we had gathered along the way. Distantly, over high mountains, storm clouds loomed ominously, but here, facing south to the bright sun, we felt at peace. Argo was a small vessel in a narrow harbour, surrounded by wrecks. The white gleam of the chalk cliffs that enclosed the bay were almost homely.

“Left them by the water’s edge, in Alba. It was a cruel act. They have no way home, those others. But she abandoned them because she is no longer the ship that she was. Something is rotten at her heart. Or something has buried itself there, and is dying, causing that corruption. She has brought us the long northern coastal route. I don’t know these seas well, but Jason does, and he has raised the question: Why didn’t we sail south, along the coast of Numida, to Carthago, then to Sicila? It would have been quicker, and far safer.

I was certain I understood the answer to the question: Argo was retracing her sea path from that previous voyage, when Jason had managed to bring her overland from the headwaters of the Daan, to the Rhone river that flowed south through Liguria and emptied into the ocean near to where Massil would one day become a haven. And then to this open sea.

Perhaps Argo was picking up echoes of that greater, happier time. Perhaps she was gathering little shards of her life, cast off in previous centuries as I knew she was capable of doing, small ships, faint echoes of her own early years that could sail or be rowed into the hidden realms of shades and shadowy magic.

It was time to return to the harbour. Tairon shrugged the water-laden bladders over his shoulders, clearly struggling with the weight—he was very slightly built—and we set off down the path.

“When did you leave Crete?” I asked him, aware that I knew very little about this man.

He staggered a little as he tried to turn, then kept on pacing. “A few years ago,” he replied. “We met in the far North, by the frozen lake. Where you met Niiv and rebuilt Argo. You surely remember.”

“Very clearly. You came out of nowhere in the middle of that long winter night. You said you’d been wandering through a maze for some time. You were surprised to find yourself so far North, so cold.”

“Yes. I got lost.”

“Who was the ruler in Crete when you left?”

There were many. He told me a name. It meant nothing. Then I asked him about the great painted palaces that had been built before the Greeklanders had conquered the island. They had been in ruins, he told me. The centre of the island had been shrouded in a permanent cloud. Every fortified town now displayed the double axe, the
labrys,
the island’s symbol of power, but the mazes had become forbidden places.

That was why and how he had come to be lost. A few boys were born into every generation with some of the old skills in maze-running. This was a strictly controlled practice. But the temptation to break taboo was usually too great. Those lads who maze-ran before they had received the necessary instruction mostly disappeared into the earth forever. The few who returned were mindless, gabbling, and were quickly sacrificed, though not to a deity but to a wild woman known as Queller.

Tairon was one of the lost.

My memory was vague; too many centuries of learning to recollect everything that came my way by way of story, action, or legend. But it seemed to me that Tairon was not just a few years out of his time, rather, nearly a thousand.

And Argo wanted him on board. My curiosity was keened. The more I heard about Crete, the more intrigued I was by the island, and by what had passed there in the long-gone.

*   *   *

From the white harbour we continued our way south, through the Tyrrhen Sea, then through the narrow straits of Mesna before catching the trade route across the ocean known as Cerauna towards Greek Land itself, to the southern peninsula, which Jason called Achaea, wary for warships and the swirling waters that could suck even a large vessel to the seabed in instants, and which were common off these shores. Charybdis was the most renowned.

We saw sails in the distance only once, some twenty or so, highly coloured, billowing in a strong wind. We could make out the faint beat of drums as the ships signalled to each other. They were Greeklander and sailing on a parallel course to our own, but sea haze and a rising swell had soon taken them from view. Rubobostes heaved at the steering oar and altered our course just enough to make sure we put even greater distance between ourselves and that unpredictable fleet.

Rubobostes was in low mood; he was sad, grieving. I had hardly spoken to the man since he had shed the ghost, in the mouth of the Rhone, but now—with Bollullos taking over at the oar—the Dacian’s heavy hand grasped my shoulder, and his foul-breathed grin greeted me as memory of our previous encounters returned. “It’s good to see you again.”

“And you.”

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“To Crete.”

“And where’s that?”

“South. A long, thin island, full of mystery.”

“Why are we going there?”

“To find answers.”

“Answers, eh?” The big man looked knowledgeably thoughtful. He reached for a small jar of wine as we sat in the hold. “Then I hope we find them. But for the moment, I’m too tired to even think of
questions.
And I miss Ruvio. Ruvio haunts my sleep. Whatever happened to Ruvio? I will die with his name on my lips, I’m sure of it.”

Ruvio was his horse.

“Ruvio is roaming free, somewhere on Alba. Fertilising everything that gallops in front of him.”

“I’m glad of that,” the Dacian murmured, then drew heavily on the jar. “That horse and I are part of the same life. Did you know that, Merlin? Not just inseparable, though we are separated now, but part of the same being.”

“I know you loved the creature very much. You were two of a kind.”

“We were one and the same,” the big man corrected. “We came from the same womb. Did I ever tell you that? The same mother gave birth to us both.”

“I didn’t know that,” I assured him uncomfortably, surprised by what he was telling me. “And perhaps the less said at this time the better.”

But the Dacian shook his head. “One mother, two children. You’ve heard of centaurs?”

“Centaurs? Yes. They once existed in Greek Land. Dead now, destroyed by Titans.”

“They exist everywhere. They’ve learned to hide. The lessons from Greek Land were not ignored. Man-chested, horse-bellied, the limb-supple grasp of a man, the swift-striding speed of an equine. I was destined to be
centaur,
but the womb split the two parts of me. It happens, apparently. So we were born brothers, one to ride and one to carry. So I was told.”

“You are part horse?”

“No. The horse part of me was separated. As I’ve just explained.”

“But your mother gave birth to an infant and a foal at the same time. Quite a woman.”

“Quite a labour,” Rubobostes added.

“Did she survive it?”

“The foal-mother died. Ruvio was huge, I’m told. My own suckling mother lived, though not for long.”

Dacians!

I began to grasp a more naturalistic situation, one based on the intense worship of the horse among Rubobostes’s clan. A woman, about to deliver a chieftain’s child, would be walled up in a cave—the mother womb—with a mare about to foal. The child and the horse would thereafter be reared together; the horse would be the child’s first horse, the bond would be maintained until the horse died. References to “centaurs” were symbolic, remembering a stranger time of myth.

Rubobostes was in his twenty-fifth summer, though he looked older because of his size and hirsute wildness. Ruvio had been the same age, then, until he was lost. An astonishing age. Dacians bred beasts to last, it seemed.

“I’m sorry about your mother. Your suckling mother.”

“I never knew her,” Rubobostes said with a shrug. “Her face was tattooed on Ruvio’s right flank. Sometimes I would cut away the hair to see that face. She was in profile. She looked very strong. That is all I had of her. I’m sorry to have lost the horse.”

*   *   *

We were in open water, dangerous waters. There was scant breeze, and though the sail was up, we had eight at the oars, rowing lazily and carefully over a sea that caught the full fire of the setting sun. There were islands to the east, but they were no more than black smears on the horizon. Talienze was at the prow, his youthful familiar, Colcu, with him. I had noticed that the closer we came to Crete, the more tense were the muscles in the Speaker’s face, the more anxious his glances. Kymon seemed relaxed, playing game after game of chance with the other
kryptoii
(occasionally including Colcu). In fact, these were not so much games as a sort of training. They were making rules of silence, laws of secrecy, plans of silent campaign. It was boyish, but it suggested stronger motives.

Talienze intrigued me, though. He and Jason had not spoken a word together, not in all the long days of the voyage. Everyone else had at least exchanged a greeting, or offered to share a task. Not those two.

In fact, just once Jason referred to the exile from Armorica who had become so important at the hall of Vortingoros.

“What do you make of him, Merlin?”

“Very hidden. Very quiet. He’s becoming anxious.”

“He’s coming close to home, I think. It’s just a feeling. But he has closer ties with this part of the world than the rest of us. Except for Tairon.”

“And yourself, of course.”

“Me? I’m from Achaea. Greek Land.”

“
Are
you going home?” I asked quickly, and the mercenary frowned. I was thinking of his earlier comment that he was astonished we were going “back” to that island.

“No. Not at all. Not home. But I’m returning. I can’t deny that.” He paused for a long time, staring out to sea, clutching the rigging, riding the shifting of the ship. Then said, “But why, how, when, whatever … the memory has gone. The memory is stolen.” And then he looked at me sharply, a half smile of irony on his lips. “At least: it is being denied me for the moment. Argo is ensuring that.”

“You and Argo have a past that goes a lot deeper, a lot closer, than I’d realised.”

“I think you’re right,” was Jason’s final comment before he moved to his oar-station to relieve Tairon.

*   *   *

The glow of the sun split the sea horizon to the east. A flock of dark-headed gulls chose to settle and fuss about our mast and rails, spreading their wings and rising as if without effort before landing again, with screeching interest at this solitary vessel. A dark mass rose before us, mountains still in night, though they began to catch the fire of the dawn. A great arm of land was reaching out to embrace us to the left. And Talienze shouted, “The land is here! Steer east, steer round the headland.”

Bollullos was instantly at the rail and flinging in the sounding rope. “Rocks! Rising fast. Back oar!”

Activity, mayhem. Argo was slowed. (She could have slowed herself! She was fickle when it came to sailing with men on board.) As the light grew stronger, we saw the shadow of the ship on the ocean floor, the movement of sea creatures, and the strewn shapes of sunken masonry.

We were in the shallows, and close to breaking on the hidden reef.

Jason reminded us all, by his actions, of what a great captain he had once been. He spat instructions to the oarsmen, took a hand at the steering oar, whilst using Rubobostes’s great strength, and with Talienze and Tairon scouring the water for hazards, seen and unseen, he guided us round and back to safety, then steered a course about the headland, in the lee of the towering cliffs, and into the safer harbour, below what Tairon instantly recognised as the Cave of Akirotiri.

We flung down the sea anchor, shipped oars, and waited for the full of the day to make our situation clear.

Chapter Sixteen

Queller

From the cave above the harbour, Queller watched the arrival of the painted ship and its strange crew. She stepped back into the shadows, hugged the cold stone wall, nervous now, and trying to remember.
Remember!
There was something familiar about the ship.

Something so familiar about the ship.